Effect of SSD and more RAM on AE (Page 1) - Equipment & Software - Forums

1 Topic by Brickman June 16, 2020 (04:19pm)

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Topic: Effect of SSD and more RAM on AE

I’m going to be upgrading my 1TB HDD to an SSD of equal capacity, as well as quadrupling my RAM amount from 4GBs to 16. The main reason I’m upgrading my storage drive is because of the slow startup speed, as well as sluggish file browsing. I’m upgrading the RAM, however, because After Effects and all my other video editing programs are heavily bogging down with my measly 4GBs. I’m confident that the SSD will improve my computer speed, but my question is: how much of an effect will the increase in RAM/the SSD have on AE CS6 and other video editors and compositors? Thanks.

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2 Reply by AquaMorph June 19, 2020 (05:08pm)

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Re: Effect of SSD and more RAM on AE

Both those changes should make massive performance increases. The faster drive will help move data from the drive to RAM, like opening programs or editing video files. RAM on a computer is basically incredibly fast storage that it closely connected to the CPU. If there was drives that were as fast as RAM we wouldn't need RAM at all. RAM is a buffer to quickly pull information the computer thinks is likely going to be called on. Most operating systems partition a bit of the hard drive and reserve it as virtual RAM. This is called a swap. When your computer starts getting close to using up all the real RAM it will transfer some of the data to the virtual RAM to free up space. When you do something that has to leverage the swap the task will get a massive performance hit because of drive speed is so much slower than RAM. Having more RAM will make this less likely to happen and your performance of your computer should increase.